Month: January 2026

I took my morning miles at a steady, slow, jogging pace today — without interrupting to catch my breath or take a few walking steps. I wasn’t pushing at all (except just to keep going), but my time came in close to the slowest days of my running. My ankle is not back to form, but I did it, and presumably I’ll manage to claw back to form gradually.

Yesterday Rosie and BRendan brought wee Edith over for a visit. Part of the point of the visit was to introduce her to Minke and Flora, but they were a bit too much for her, so she built train tracks and played with our stock of stuffed animals, and utterly charmed us, as always. Good craic with Brendan and Rosie, lovely times.

Today I don’t have any leadership responsibilities; we’ll go to the 10:30 at St Helen’s, and then I’ll buckle down and work on some plans for weeks to come.

I combined a respect for the morning’s cold rainy weather with mercy for my ankle, and opted not to run or walk this morning. I hate skipping a day, and I may go out for groceries later, but I devoted my morning to other mundane tasks.

Sometime when I have the time and mood I want to respond to Chris’s response to Cory’s Pluralistic column on writing. As someone who teaches writing more or less constantly (though not usually in a class dedicated to the topic, but in trying to help students improve their essay-writing), I have a couple of bones I’d like to pick with these esteemed friends. Not so as to defy them, of course, but to think along with them….

Dave and I hate cooking up titles for every post. Sometimes there’s a natural, or clever, or just foolish title one can give, but other times all I want to do is post something, and no-o-o-o-o, it has to have a title.

I’m progressively picking up the pace of my morning run these days. Today I drew close to what would have been a slow day when I was just beginning to time my runs, even though I slowed to a walk several times when one or another joint, muscle, ligament, or tendon issued a warning. The way human anatomy tears and heals intrigues me. For several days after my fall, my left ankle hurt; then it abated and my right knee hurt; then the ankle reasserted its right to ache and my knee quiesced; and this morning, my ankle hurt a bit, but the real limit came from my left knee (which had hitherto not spoken up at all). I fell only eight days ago, so of course I haven’t healed all the way yet (I’m thankful for how very rapidly my ankle and legs have bounced back). And clearly and not surprisingly, the rest of my body has issues to work out at paces that differ based both on my daily demands and the interactions among the bones and sinews that the fall affected. All interesting, all occasions for learning more. Maybe I’ll pursue a medical degree when I retire….

(That’s a joke.)

So, morning miles, coffee and fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, appointment at R&R, picked up some local cheese for Margaret at the market square, and now I’m resting my ankle and making a budget spreadsheet for our house search.

After a crowded day, a low-traffic day (appropriately, since I’m theoretically working only half-time). My walk was a bit faster than it has recently been, as I took shorter, jogging-style paces part of the way.

Got up and walked (mostly) my miles this morning. My ankle resented the amount I asked of it yesterday, so I gave it an easier start today. After coffee and hot breakfast, public office hours, and the weekly Staff Meeting I came home for lunch and handling email and perhaps beginning work on my newsletter column on The Conversion of Paul, then another meeting this evening, just for the sheer fun of it.

I walked and ran, showered, had my coffee and fruit, then headed off north of Oxford to Church House, where I experienced a long and informative day of instruction on how to become retired. I was tired at the end, so all I need is a re- prefix and I’ve got the process knocked.

Two mile walk, with another wee bit more running: As yesterday, so today, the ankle feels all right, but various other parts of my legs speak up with notices that the Wednesday Fall had thrown them off-kilter. I keep thinking that this should be a mere out-of-the-habit return to exercise, forgetting that, no, I’m taking my return to running easy because of injury. Coffee and fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, coffee and toast, reading, email, and planning an upcoming College of Preachers event on Preaching the Gospels in Lent.

The excitement never stops! I’m not even going to tell you what tomorrow’s big thrill will be.

I walked my morning miles today, taking a very few intermittent short runs as an experiment, and got home just fine, thank you. When I ran, I noted with relief that my ankle behaved most usually, and with caution that my right knee (of the leg which slipped, turned slightly, and went out from under me on Wednesday) gave me warning shots of almost-pain. So I’ll guard the right knee, and try to stretch out the intervals of running for as long as the knee will tolerate.
Hot breakfast, some kitchen cleaning, and sermon work this morning.

I woke this morning after a good night’s sleep, flexed my foot, and discovered (to my astonishment) that I didn’t feel any soreness at all. It felt a bit tender if I massaged it, but after feeling very painful Wednesday night, no real residual pain remained. While I am not at all complaining, my body has missed a perfect chance to teach me a lesson about being careful and ageing and not having magical recuperative powers as I once assumed I did. I’ll try to remember, though, even without the week or more of gradual resumption of ordinary activities.

No run, even with remarkable return to form and flexibility, but coffee and fruit, a shower, Morning Prayer, and a long conversation with Fr Paul in the morning. I’ll probably work on my Sunday sermon in the afternoon, and who knows what-all for the remainder of the day.

(The local story, I mean, the hyperlocal story — The Story is the murder of a Minneapolis civilian by state forces.)

Yesterday, as noted, I fell on my way to Morning Prayer and wrenched my ankle. I had run earlier with no difficulty, but in dressing for the day I put on dress shoes rather than trainers, no treads vs high treads, and didn’t stop to consider the difference that might make (did make). It was a good fsall, not a silent-movie pratfall but a Keanu Reeves lean-backward in slow motion till (in my case) my centre of gravity just toppled. The instant bio-anæsthesia of shock response buffered my sense of what had happened for a good while; I went on to the service, then for coffee, then for a couple of meetings (at which the Team Rector, bless her, insisted that I elevate my foot), then a funeral and stoipped by the grocery to obtain a bag of frozen peas (i.e., ‘ice pack’), but by the time I got home, my ankle was barking ferociously, and I spent the rest of the afternoon either sitting with my foot up or resting with my foot actually over the rest of my body. My foot swelled, my ankle hurt acutely, and I was wondering about going to the local A&E when morning came.

After a really good night’s sleep during which my foot was especially elevated much of the time, I woke up feeling wporlds better. I seem to have escaped significant damage, and although my foot is swollen and bruised, naproxen and rest mean that I haven’t felt meaningful pain today at all. In fact, the greater pain has come from my right knee, which hadn’t bothered me at all yesterday (and even that is just minor). It seems as if I flexed just short of the point of tearing or breaking, for which thanks be to heaven.

I’m continuing to take things easy today, staying home, inside, with my foot up as much of the time as I can bear to. It’s discoloured, may bruise in a while, but for the time being I think Ijust stretched everything. No running for a serious while, though, I expect.

Not necessarily the private army (though I favour that) but definitely the frozen water. It rained last night, and this morning the temperature is 2° (but chills to -6°), so that any given paved surface might be coated with frost, or rough enough for traction, or be actually icy. I needed to run this morning, so I ran cautiously and tentatively at a pace much slower than my usual. I skidded slightly once or twice, but did not have a dangerous slip, and my Achilles tendon made no complaints at all, so that’s a win. Coffee and fruit, I’m about to clean up and dress for work, then Morning Prayer, a meeting with the Team Rector, then the full Staff Meeting, then a funeral for a member of St Helen’s congregation.

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Pride goeth… I slipped and twisted my ankle on the way to Morning Prayer. *sigh*

Just to note that there’s a discussion of Daniel Boyarin’s recent claim that [premodern] Judaism is not rightly characterised as a ‘religion’ (in the modern sense) at Marginalia, and a reminder (which I had forgotten) that Brent Nongbri published a book a while ago arguing (similarly to Preus, Z Smith, McCutcheon, King, and others) that ‘religion’ is strictly a modern Western notion which may be useful in the analysis of premodern (and presumably non-Western) phenomena, but only with painstaking self-critical caution. Reviews abound.

The literature on this sort of controversy far exceeds anything I can adequately bibliographise here. You’re welcome to add favourites in the comments, but I’m not myself going to try to keep logging every useful publication on ‘religion’; I have other fish to fry (or more pertinently in my case, ‘other tofu to stir-fry’).

We observed Epiphany on Sunday in the parish, so today was just Tuesday fter Epiphany, and not the Feast itself, in Abingdon. But in the larger church, today is the Feast of the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, so cheers for us on Team Gentiles today. And modified cheers for snow on Epiphany (I don’t remember so much snow for a long time) and on a more solmn note, the year’s mind of Margaret’s dad, Dick Bamforth.

It had not started snowing yet when I left home for my morning miles; it came as a surprise when the sun had come up and I looked out the back door to see real, actual snow dusting the garden, and then even more snow when I left the house for church. I didn’t run this morning, just run-walked, especially for the stretch on Park Road where the shadow of St Michael’s blocks the sun from warming and melting the accumulated frost-ice. The slippery conditions and my intent to coddle my Achilles tendon this morning (and my plan to leaven my running with regular breaks gently to accommodate aging knees) turned out well. The miles took about half again as long as when I run it, which satisfies me, and my tendon gave me no challenges.

Coffee and fruit, shower and dress, Morning Prayer and then public office hours at R&R, and in a bit I will go back to church for a meeting of the Pastoral Team. I plan on doing some reading today, and perhaps writing an overdue review (amazing what can happen when one doesn’t have overdue essays hanging over one’s head).

Wishing all the peace of a snowy Epiphany, and consolation and healing from the sadness of bereavement. May the souls of our beloved rest in the peace and light of divine grace, and may their memory be for a blessing.

I didn’t get enough sleep last night because one of the ladies, the smaller one, from Yorkshire, had an unaccountable fixation on waking me up repeatedly. I went to bed earlier than usual for the express prupose of getting more sleep, and somebody exploded that plan from midnight on.

Continued arctic weather (I mean, ‘from the arctic’, not ‘actually comparable to the climate of the arctic’) has kept the ground frosty at best, icy at worst, which slows my morning pace significantly, accounting in part for my slow-ish pace for my miles. The rest of the accounting — apart from ‘still an old, not very fit guy’ — involves a warning bark from my right Achilles tendon. I do not reckon I can afford to ignore warnings from either of my Achilles tendons, so I dialled down my speed for the last half mile. At any rate, I got the miles in, and literally nobody cares about the time. Coffee, fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, coffee, toast, finishing up some parish business, then possibly some reading. Did I mention that I finished The Last Essay?

-3°, felt like -8°, and I ran my miles anyway. I ran at a below average pace, but it would have been faster if I hadn’t encountered icy patches at which I had to slow down and step cautiously. It gave no pleasure, but I hate falling away from regular exercise, so I had to just do it. Coffee, fruit, shower, dress, Morning Prayer, and off to the 8:00 at St Nicolas’s.

I feel as though I ought to respond to Chris‘s lovely, generous response — especially since Dave has noticed. This blogging thing — it may just catch on after all…

I answered Chris with first attention to something that wasn’t even his main point. That’s an initial sign of his grace as a conversation partner; many people would just have harrumphed and castigated me for missing the point, as the beginning of my reply admittedly indicated that I might have done. I think I needed to clear that ground before I began to scaffold a more pertinent response, but I didn’t frame my post that way. Thanks for your patience, Chris.

Eventually I drew near to Chris’s sensible, intriguing suggestion that ‘religion’ may helpfully treated as a ‘container’ (in the sense of ‘a bounded space of shared identity and meaning-making’). I was answering Chris from within the container, as it were, while he was contemplating ‘religion’ as if from looking at the container. I forbear to say ‘from outside’, since (a) Chris is too subtle to suppose he escapes being containerised, and (b) he himself participates in practices internal to the container, though he and I might (given world enough, and time) less coyly sit down, and think which way we walk, and pass our short lives’ day in articulating, assessing, acknowledging, rejoicing in, and in some cases discovering the insignificance of our differences.

There’s an irony, too, in my having begun my response from the position that I hold various doctrinal claims to be ‘true’, inasmuch as I’ve repeated far too often my axiom ‘A theory of truth is one theory too many’ (a misrepresentation of what Freud attributed to Charcot: ‘Theory is good, but that doesn’t prevent things from existing’ in Complete Works volume 3, p. 13). I say that — heuristically, not metaphysically — because we demonstrate what we take to be true by how we live more than by what abstractions we affirm. But again, Chris didn’t take any cheap tu quoque shots on this point, bless him. I do affirm, unhesitatingly, that the ordinary repertoire of Christian beliefs are true, though I enact that faith very imperfectly, and though in the analytical sense I don’t profess to know just how they are true.

Now by way of direct response, when Chris says ‘he isn’t necessarily interested in my framing and exploration of religion-as-container, but instead in sharing the way in which his participation in his religion guides his participation in civic life’ I should have made clear that I am interested in his framing, and I take it to be a useful dialogical gesture, so long as no one takes the gesture of containerisation to capture what ‘religion’ is really all about, and doubly so when that ‘really’ departs from what the religion’s adherents would say about themselves. No, adherents don’t have some privileged status for describing truly the nature of their way, but discussion of ‘religion’ loses some degree of usefulness when it loses touch with what the adherents might say about themselves.

That ‘degree of usefulness’ may not be worth worrying about in some circumstances. Let’s say, strictly hypothetically, that a ‘religion’ devised as a tax dodge that in turn grew beyond its initial function and became an international mind control syndicate — the dangers of corruption in civic life would warrant talking about the ‘religion’ in terms that adherents might not affirm, and we would all have to deal with the fallout. My attitude toward truth-claims isn’t negative across the board; I just don’t thinnk we often gain clarity about a problem by arriving at a crystalline abstract definition of truth. Or religion — which may be just what Chris was talking about in the first place, which makes this a great place for me to just stop talking: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen (‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Ogden trans., p. 188/189).

No, I did not run this morning in subzero temperatures that felt like -8°, on pavements that are icy in spots. No, no. I’m frustrated by that — I don’t like interrupting my running schedule — but I’m not foolhardy.